I should tell you a strange story, as the dark has settled in and the street lamps are scarce outside my window.
For its veracity I can rely only on the memories of an old woman called Mrs.Moore, my parents and a postman. As well as any testimony we can extract from my great-grandfather, who was already dead at the time these events happened, in 1987.
He bought this house not all that long after it was built in 1903. He had watched it being made, brick by brick, and seemingly without foundations. It was a cold house, high on a hill, and the winds shrilled through it. They rattled the windows mercilessly, until someone thought to invent double glazing.
In those early days, as it does now, the house looked out over the 12th century church with its simple clock face, and the various buildings of the town. It gazed out further to take in the sight of the downs, where a scattering of trees decorated the hills. A few intrepid houses perched amongst the English greenness, too, and their windows winked in the sunlight. These houses, of course, ought never to be lived in by anyone except hermits and witches but estate agents have no sense of occasion.
Great-grandfather paid barely a song for his new home because the woman who lived here, alone, didn’t want to. One day he simply rang the bell and made her an offer which she gratefully accepted.
Then he lived here, happily, with my great-grandmother. He was quite a forthright man, and she was lovely. He was well-liked but could be cantankerous, where she was all elegance.
This was the time of fine dresses, and of horses and carriages. Often in the mornings she would send letters to her sister, who lived on the other side of town. There were two posts a day, back then, so her sister usually got her missives in time to come round for tea. They lived a quiet life. He was a builder, himself, and both of them doted on my father, who was their grandson. My Dad used to stay here at weekends, and during the summer, in the room that is now mine.
After my great-grandmother and great-grandfather both died, this house was turned into two flats. The staircase, with its flourish of a bannister, was sealed off from view, by a wall, and from the downstairs ‘flat’ you couldn’t see the stairs at all. Or even suspect they might be there.
Time passed; ticking itself piously onwards, as it rather insists on doing, and the top flat fell empty. The wallpaper peeled and the damp started to settle in.
The bottom flat, meanwhile, continued to be lived in by an old woman called Mrs.Moore and the silverfish moved in with her, now, uninvited. They shimmied and wriggled on the walls, they feasted on books, and crawled behind things.
The whole house grew difficult, as nature tried to find its way in through any openings, and she struggled to take care of her half of it.
My father, whose name had been written beneath the wallpaper by my great-grandfather, and who had measured his growing height against the Edwardian doors of this house, still remembered it fondly. He missed it.
So, when he heard about the top flat becoming empty he wanted to live in it with my mother. She came to see it. It felt gloomy and oppressive to her. It was nothing like a place she wanted to call home. The garden ran tangled and wild. Cats that belonged only to themselves were hunters of smaller creatures in the tall grass.
Everything needed cleaning, and mending, and caring about. She didn’t want to live here and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings so she said while looking around “you know, I’d love it if it was a whole house again but I can’t see us living in it as a flat”.
She said this, out loud, and safe in the knowledge that the flat downstairs was lived in by Mrs.Moore.
It was just days later that something strange happened.
The postman, doing his rounds, and walking up the long hill saw Mrs.Moore sitting out on the front step, in her nightgown, with the front door wide open. When he got to her she was frightened, and shivering, and resolute that she wouldn’t stay in the house any longer. The postman asked her what had happened and she hugged her shawl tighter around herself and told him. She said “As I walked out into the hall, a man came thundering down the stairs towards me, shouting, and he said “get out of my house, get out of MY house” and he pointed straight at me”.
The postman looked through the front door to where no stairs, of course, were visible.
“What stairs?” he asked her.
She pointed to where they’d been before they’d been walled off, long before she got there.
“What did this man look like?” asked the postman, sitting beside her, now, to bring her comfort, and she described the man in detail. His height, his clothing, his face. His terribly angry voice.
The postman raised his eyebrows and said it sounded an awful lot like the man who used to live here (my great-grandfather, who he had known).
Perhaps she had dreamed him.
Perhaps there are many men who look alike. Perhaps she and the postman pieced together a story out of her fear. Perhaps many things. But she was sure it had happened and my great-grandfather was, after all, known as being a peppery sort of man who might do something so impolite. Small details like his death notwithstanding.
Mrs.Moore really could not bear to stay here. She didn’t want to meet him ever again and she started to hope that she would get a place in a local building, made to be like a mock Spanish villa, that housed a community for the elderly.
My parents, hearing of all this through the inevitable grapevine that all small towns have, were determined to help her. They wrote a letter to a local councillor to try to get her a place there and, when she did, they served as her movers, too, packing her few boxes into their little car.
It was a better home for her than this house which must have creaked its indignation at its increasing decay with every twitch of the old floorboards. It took my parents two years, working on it by themselves after work and weekends, to make it habitable again.
My maternal Nan, rather famously, came to see it early on in the renovations. She took one step into it, saw some of the dirt and creatures it seemed to be hoarding, and raced from the front door straight to the back door, as fast as she could. Flinging “it looks promising, dear” over her shoulder, like a parting gift. Then she quietly advised my mum not to try to fix it, over the phone, later that night.
I’m glad they did fix it.
One day, in the dark and windowless dining room my parents finally moved the giant wardrobe Mrs.Moore had left behind. They found tall French windows that would not open because forsythia had grown against them, wicked and spindly, like fairytale thorns. My mother, without a hero’s sword but with patience, cut a way through.
No one ever saw my great-grandfather, again. Yet he did not rest straight away, if my parents are to be believed. Every time they made a significant change to the work he’d done around the house they could expect to hear, as they sat down to supper, the sound of angry footsteps ascending the staircase and then the pointed slamming of his old office door in indignation.
Whenever she worked in the house, alone, too, my mother often felt an unmistakable presence. The first time she was up a ladder, with a roller, when the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She knew someone was behind her. The presence felt hostile and she backed down the steps slowly before turning around to find that no one was there. Later, though, the feeling of hostility softened. She still felt watched but the watcher seemed more friendly.
Neither of them ever caught sight, or sense, of my great-grandmother who, after all, was not incorrigible. I did apparently see her, once, although I don’t remember it. I was small, and left to my own devices, in the front room, when I met a lady in an impressive dress and thought she was a guest.
I ran to find my mother to ask her who the well-dressed lady was, and described her in all her finery.
This is certainly a house with character. The pipes sing at the hint of any water, the lights go out, suddenly, for their own amusement and nature still tries to get in whenever we aren’t looking.
It is not, however, a mean house. Even at the witching hours, sitting alone to read, and listening to its improbable creakings it does not seem like any sinister ghost is waiting there to harm us.
So, even if time bends enough to let dead great-grandfathers walk, or to have people hallucinate them, it isn’t frightening to live here. Although, I know how sinister it was for Mrs.Moore.
I am also far too agnostic to believe in ghosts. So when, occasionally, something unexplainable happens, I think of science with all the devotion of a nun at the rosary. As though it might ward off the unforgivable evidence of my senses.
If the shadows on a particular wall should look, for all the world, like a woman playing the piano somewhere unseen, or the curtains should flick themselves open in just the way my father used to when he was alive and feeling inquisitive, I just tell myself it isn’t real.
Of course, it isn’t real. Who could believe it? We live in a rational, material world with rational, material rules where the dead stay buried and shadows have to behave themselves accordingly.
As I said, I really don’t believe in ghosts.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if they might believe in us.